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Huddled in a long walled field, gates firmly barred, men standing vainly before their wives and children with sticks and mattocks at the ready, the villagers, apart from the infants among them, knew that their end was near. The armoured troops, swords glinting in the early morning sun, upon the shouted order, began their work. Those villagers who pleaded on their knees for mercy, being stationary, were easily dispatched with a single thrust. Babies were even more easily, and with rather less effort, beheaded or transfixed. Adults and older children who resisted, or made efforts to evade the sword for a while, gained only a very few moments of life, generally running from one sword onto another.
So it was that a young shepherdess, attracted from the pastures high above the village by the unaccustomed distant noises she had heard, came to the gate of the field, now no longer barred, but hanging open, and saw, not the soldiers, but their cruel and ineluctable trace: the grass of the field soaked by the blood of her kin and her neighbours, still, sprawled and mutilated, of whom not one remained alive to to utter a final word of farewell or consolation.
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